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Estimated Human Losses in Future Earthquakes in Central Myanmar

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

	BACKGROUND INFORMATION

 
I estimate that the city of Yangon (formerly Rangoon) and adjacent provinces (Yangon, Rakhine, Ayeryarwady, Bago) represent an earthquake risk similar in severity to that of Istanbul and the Marmara Sea region. The number of fatalities and injured in a single future earthquake may exceed 100,000, possibly by much. After the M 9.3 Sumatra earthquake of December 2004 that ruptured from central Sumatra to the Andaman Islands (e.g., Mignan et al. 2006), the likelihood of additional ruptures in the direction of Myanmar, and within Myanmar, has increased (V. G. Kossobokov, M8-MSc Global Test communication). This assessment is especially plausible given that M 8.6 (March 2005) and M 8.2 and M 7.9 earthquakes (September 2007) extended the great 2004 rupture to the south. Considering the dense population of the aforementioned provinces and the fact that earthquakes of M 7.5 class historically have occurred there (in 1858, 1895, and three in 1930), it would not be surprising if similar-sized earthquakes should occur in the coming decades.

	INTRODUCTION

 
The World Agency of Planetary Monitoring and Earthquake Risk Reduction (WAPMERR) is a nonprofit organization charged with assisting countries that lack extensive seismological expertise and also with assisting international rescue agencies in mitigating earthquake disasters (http://www.wapmerr.org). It conducts a real-time service open to anyone interested in receiving e-mails containing loss estimates for earthquakes with M 6 worldwide within one hour after the event. These estimates are also made available to the United Nations community via the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (GDACS) Web site. In addition, WAPMERR calculates loss scenarios for regions of particular interest, in the hope that mitigating measures can be taken where the predicted disaster might have serious consequences.

I predicted the extent of human losses in the M 7.6 Kashmir earthquake of October 2005 to a . . . [Full Text of this Article]

World Agency of Planetary Monitoring
and Earthquake Risk Reduction
2 rue de Jargonnant
1207 Geneva, Switzerland
wapmerr@maxwyss.com